Deputies subdue suspect

A recently widowed man held off police after shooting his girlfriend Sunday night, cops said.

July 12, 2005|By Jeff Libby and Erin Ailworth, Sentinel Staff Writers

DEBARY -- After fatally shooting his girlfriend Sunday night, a retired handyman stood on his front porch and held police at bay for nearly two hours, alternately threatening to shoot himself and deputies, the Volusia County Sheriff's Office said.

Garry W. Freeman, 61, called police just after 11 p.m., telling an emergency dispatcher that he had shot Marisol Acosta, 40, of DeLand. Freeman told the dispatcher that he shot Acosta two times in the head, stabbed her, beat her "and everything else," according to 911 tapes and an arrest report released Monday.

When Freeman walked outside his double-wide mobile home in Highland Country Estates just before 1 a.m. Monday and failed to obey police commands, deputies subdued him with nonlethal beanbag projectiles fired from shotguns.

Acosta had tried to take money from his bank account, Freeman told police. He had been drinking Sunday night, police said, and also took some pills that had been prescribed to Acosta for depression.

Police arrested Freeman on a charge of first-degree murder Monday. He was being held without bail at the Volusia County Branch Jail in Daytona Beach.

Neighbors said Freeman's wife, Vicki Freeman, died recently after an illness. Since then, they said, the man who was known for looking out for the widows of the tidy, quiet retirement community off U.S. Highway 17-92 and for helping out with repairs had often been depressed.

But Freeman also installed an above-ground pool in his back yard and had been "carrying on" with Acosta "like a schoolboy in love," said Marilyn Rolfson, 61, a neighbor and friend.

"I'm flabbergasted," said Rolfson, who had hired Freeman to put in ceiling fans. "He was a really nice guy. I have no idea what happened. . . . But he's been depressed since his wife died."

Acosta's aunt Gloria Galiano said she and her sister met Freeman just a few weeks ago for dinner. She was unsure how the couple met or how long they had dated, but she said Acosta had lived in the area for about three years.

"Two weeks ago, she invited us over to the house to meet him," Galiano said in Spanish. "He impressed me a bit."

"He was a man of respect," Galiano said. "I don't know what happened."

Galiano described Acosta as a "charismatic" mother of three who worked at Wal-Mart. "All the world got along with her," Galiano said through tears.

Police had no record of previous calls at Freeman's home on Clairmont Avenue, a white mobile home with a flower box in the front window and a white picket fence.

On Sunday night, more than a dozen marked and unmarked patrol cars flooded the narrow streets of the retirement community, neighbors said. Police with rifles huddled outside the house into Monday morning as a dispatcher tried by phone to persuade Freeman to put down his handgun and come out of the house peaceably.

Early in the nearly two-hour conversation, struggling with the reality that his girlfriend was dead at his feet, Freeman told the dispatcher, "I was in a rage."

Later in the conversation, Freeman wavered between threats to kill himself and questions for the dispatcher, asking her how he could prompt deputies to open fire on him.

"A hole in my head would be lovely," Freeman said. "Shoot at me and hit me. That's all. . . . I want to end it, lady. I don't want to sit in jail for a long time. I don't want to go to trial. . . . I want to go, lady."

The dispatcher eventually persuaded Freeman to walk outside with the gun in a towel and put it on the trunk of a vehicle in the driveway, but as Freeman came out of the house, deputies told him to drop objects he had in his hands and to fall to his knees.

When Freeman failed to obey, police knocked him down with beanbag projectiles fired from shotguns, deputies said.